Ep. #1148 - Data Storytelling for Business Growth

Matt DeCoursey  00:00

And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey here to have another conversation on hoping helps your business grow. We’ve talked a lot about data on this show, we’ve talked about how it needs to be actionable to be valuable, and that data is everywhere. And some people think it’s the most valuable thing on the planet. But what you really need to learn how to do with data is learn how to tell a story with it. And the numbers usually don’t lie. They say a lot of things that you might want to know to help your business grow. And once again, that’s why we’re here at Startup Hustle to try to help your business grow. For you introduce who I’m having this conversation witha quick reminder that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by full scale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult and Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably and has the platform to help you manage that team go to FullScale.io To learn more, if you’re not aware, that’s my business. And we love talking to Startup Hustle listeners. So head on over to FullScale.io It’s a couple of questions. We’ll see if we can help you out with me today. I’ve got Courtney Lindau. And Courtney is a partner and specializes in web analytics and business intelligence at Nimble Gravity, straight out of Denver, Colorado, one of my favorite cities and states anywhere, Courtney, Welcome to Startup Hustle.

Courtney Lindau  01:20

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Matt DeCoursey  01:23

Yeah, well,  let’s kick this conversation off with a little bit more about your backstory and and hopefully a little about the problem that you’re solving. Oh, by the way, go to nimblegravity.com. There’s a link in the show notes for that it’s right down there under that Full Scale link. So once you go click that right now, so you can have a little bit of context about what Courtney is up to at her shop. All right, so your backstory.

Courtney Lindau  01:48

Yeah, so I’ve been with Nimble gravity for a little over two years now. But before that I I’m from Colorado, born and raised. So love to hear that you love Colorado, I went to CU Boulder, actually, so just can’t leave the mountains. And I started my career at an agency in web analytics and got to work with a lot of companies kind of in the fashion and apparel ecommerce space. Then I worked at Arrow Electronics, which is a fortune 150 company really diving deep into their data, which is very kind of unique with different products and parts that you’re not usually looking at after coming from fashion. And then I joined nimble gravity to get to work with a bunch of amazing and talented folks working through everything that comes with data. So nimble gravity is a consultancy that specializes in data science, e commerce strategy, digital transformation, web analytics, we also do some web development and app development. So a really broad scale of departments that we have. And really our goal is driving really interesting insights from data. So everything that we do is based on tracking accurate data, uncovering really interesting stories with data. And really helping companies utilize the data points that they either already have, or might be lacking, and that we can help find for them to grow their business. With those stories, we tell it data.

Matt DeCoursey  03:26

As I mentioned in the intro, you know, we’ve talked a lot of that data on this show. And I think the the sophisticated view of it and the experience we owe that is that if you can’t turn it into something actionable, it doesn’t have a whole lot of value. Storytelling kind of helps with that. So I guess the first question I’d have is, when I talk to you is where are you seeing businesses go wrong with their data analytics or how they’re using it? Or how are they not telling a story with it?

Courtney Lindau  04:00

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s, that’s the biggest key is being able to turn just raw data points into actionable insights. And really where I see companies going wrong, is getting too focused on either tracking everything, or wanting every tool. So we see a lot of times that especially in larger corporate companies, you’ll get a new team mate in there who really loves one particular tool. But it might have overlap with a tool that’s already in place. But if there’s enough budget, maybe now there’s two tools doing something similar. The company doesn’t know which one is the one to use. And then oftentimes, you’ll see that people just kind of give up. And there might be a lot of really valuable data. But if it’s hard to know where to go for something, you can’t get to the point where you’re able to tell a story or even really make sense of your data. So that’s a big challenge and even kind of alongside that a lot of times it’s just su data in general. So even if they have the right tools in place, maybe it is that they have tracked every single interaction possible across everywhere on the site. But it’s not named in a good way, or it’s just too much, and they don’t know what to do with it. And they don’t know what they’re actually trying to do with it. That gets to be a huge problem, where they can’t really make sense of like, what are our KPIs? What is it that actually is important? What are those metrics and dimensions that help make sense of those things that are important. So that we can actually get to a point of measuring those over time, seeing what like levers you can pull to make them improved, make it a better experience for the customer. And then that’s really where you’ll go to make sense of better data.

Matt DeCoursey  05:48

Yeah, and that’s, you know, data is everywhere. And if your sisters say, you’re out there, you’ve developed software platform, and you’re like, Oh, I haven’t been tracking my data properly. It’s probably in there. I mean, it’s probably in your server and your database. And a lot of times, so when you mentioned like messy or sloppy data. Here, I’m here, I’ll flex my data science skills from the one on one level, so you have structured and unstructured data. And for those of you that are wondering what I’m talking about, it’s pretty easy to visualize if you have a spreadsheet somewhere that is well organized, that would represent structured data. And that’s where you can look at it. And then there’s everything else. And that’s where people get kinda confused with stuff. Because if, you know, I mentioned that a lot of people have data and information and historical stuff at their business, they don’t even realize they might have it. When it’s in when it’s all jumbled and messy, and everything, it’s just kind of there. And, you know, in order to you got to start by making sense of it and organizing stuff. And then as you mentioned, getting into, well, how do we analyze this? And then eventually, how do we analyze this fast enough that we could actually make an informed decision with? Because if what you’re doing is looking back at information about your business, months later, and you’re like, Oh, well, our customers usually churn when these three things happen, you’re like, and here’s a whole bunch of people that churn who cares man, like do something about? And that’s, and that’s the challenge, and how often do you run into situations where your clients or whoever you’re working with, have that issue? You know, they’re like, Oh, well, we see that a bunch of people quit or do this or do that, but don’t have any idea how to prevent it.

Courtney Lindau  07:35

Yeah, I all the time, I think that’s usually the starting place for most companies, when they’re starting to look at their data or starting to get to a place where they want to make those insights and be a more data driven company, is usually it starts from someone going, Oh, now that I understand what’s here, I’m seeing that it’s bad, the credit conversion rates dropping, or we’re seeing a lot of churn. Or maybe you found a point in the checkout funnel, that is having a lot of drop off. Usually, that’s kind of where people start of, okay, I see that something was wrong, but I don’t know how to fix it. And a lot of times, we have quite a few different ways of solving this. Sometimes it’s just trying to figure out okay, so what are the different areas? If it’s a turn concern? Okay, what are all of those different touch points that we might have? What are all those places where we can try to keep them coming back and not turning? So starting to track, like every level of a funnel journey, you know, all of our different marketing channels, and just making sure that all of those different steps in the process are tracked? So that we can see, okay, well, is there a certain touch point? That’s frustrating? Is there a certain touch point or step in the funnel that like, they tried to click on a button and the buttons broken? You know, trying to pinpoint some of those specific areas is usually the best place for making improvements, that you don’t have so much of that, oh, shoot, we saw a problem six months ago. But you know, it’s kind of a good starting place, like at least they’ve recognized that they have a problem. That’s better than just kind of going along and not realizing it. So once you identify that, then it’s pinpointing. Okay, how do we qualify each of these steps and then from there, it’s okay, we can do X, Y, and Z as a brainstorm of all the different ways we can fix it. And then maybe it’s something like AB testing of all of the different options for how you could fix it. Whether that’s if it’s a marketing step, that’s having issues like your email campaigns have really bad drop off. Maybe it’s AB testing your emails, or if it’s within your checkout funnel, it’s AB testing and different experience or finding different opportunity there. And that’s really a good place for going forward improvements.

Matt DeCoursey  10:03

Well, they call it data science for a reason. And that’s that sometimes that data is going to lead to firm answers. And sometimes, as scientists are famous for saying, well, that’s that’s warrants more study. The term data science, I think, can be it’s a very broad term. And, you know, as someone who employs a lot of developers and different folks, as data scientists come in a lot of different packages, and shapes and forms. And some of them need to be developers. Some of them are more like analysts. But according to chat GPT data science is a multidisciplinary field that combines various techniques and methods to extract insights, knowledge and meaningful information from large and complex datasets. It involves applying scientific methods, algorithms and statistical principles to analyze data and solve real world problems. I feel like that’s like a high level of it. Because on some levels, I think data science can be as simple as like, what you were talking about kind of looking at the story. And the journey, I don’t think is data science even needs to be as sophisticated as that definition. Some of it’s as simple as like, good old school, Google Analytics and understanding where people are jumping out of your cart. You know, like, what, where do you know, here’s a form that has 10 different pages? And my first question would be why people don’t make it. So. But you know, you can see where there’s a lot of stuff you see where people are exiting. And in the world of E commerce, you know, they look at cart abandonment, like how many of you put go and put it in your cart? You’re on some levels interested? Why didn’t you make it to the cash register and understanding there’s the more obstacles and peril that a buyer has to go through on the way to the cash register? The last they’re going to do it and the more steps you ask any human to perform, the less likely they are going to get it done correctly. So the simplification that they would you consider that to be some of the I mean, those are examples of storytelling in some regards, right?

Courtney Lindau  12:11

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think so much of the storytelling comes from those like trying to make sense of, okay, our form is 10 pages. And we can tell from the data, that that’s frustrating that people are dropping off on page seven. So maybe we need to make our page, our pages like our form six pages, because we know that everyone drops off at seven pages. And while that’s not like the most fascinating or fun story to tell, it’s still kind of a story of now we know something about our data, like now we know that the 10 page form is not a good size to form. And we have data to back that up. So

Matt DeCoursey  12:52

You know what’s fun and exciting, though? Selling more stuff.

Matt DeCoursey  12:59

So therefore, anything that leads up to that should be still considered fun and exciting. Because if you don’t fix this stuff, you’re not going to sell more stuff. Sales cures ails, it makes your life feel better. And then I mean, realistically, I think if you want to be a good purveyor of any service or product you want, should want to make the user experience the best.

Courtney Lindau  13:20

Yes, for sure.

Courtney Lindau  13:25

Absolutely, absolutely.

Matt DeCoursey  13:27

So if I had to take a shot at data store, Matt goes to your website, Matt hits the first page and sees that there are 27 questions to answer. Matt leaves. Yep. That’s the story. Right.

Courtney Lindau  13:40

Yeah, exactly. And then go ahead. Yeah. And then if if I were to see that, like, okay, maybe I see that Matt interacted with a bunch of things on there and left from the homepage, then it’s okay, what can I do on this website? That gives Matt the answers that he was looking for and wasn’t able to find? So, you know, looking at what it was that you interacted with, you know, what frustration points you had, we love tools like full story that give you the session recording? To help answer the why that’s kind of hard to get to with something like a Google Analytics, because you can’t always see the frustration just in like click tracking. Sometimes you need to watch a session recording of someone clicking something 30 times to realize like, oh, that’s broken.

Matt DeCoursey  14:30

What you said you had your small story. There was a tool I had one time when when we were building gigabyte credit hot jar, which I think is a similar we use that way. You can actually like save records the screen essentially. And it’s so insightful because, you know, you can you can sense the confusion when it exists because you see the mouse moving around or the hesitancy to do certain things and I mean, that’s So it’s it’s uh, they’re like Intel, hey, you need to be obsessed with if you want your platform, your product and everything, if you want to sell more stuff, you got to make it easy for people to buy stuff. Yeah, I think that’s, you know, there’s, I’ve been such a gnat about this. So I mentioned Giga book at one point Giga book. So that’s I’m also the founder of that. And it’s a customizable booking platform. And, you know, years ago, when we were trying to grow it, we realized that because it was so customizable, that it was really hard to get people set up properly, and people don’t have it set up properly, then they don’t stick around because it’s too hard for them to use. And then we also didn’t want to make you have to go through this massive onboarding process. So we created a little bit of data storytelling and observation ourselves, we did an A B test. So if you’re not familiar with that, that means this test has taken one path, this is taken another and you see which gets the best results, you can go a through how a through infinity on how many of these you want to create, but a B is probably the more common one. But we were very terrified to not let someone enter the platform at all right, and just let them poke around. But so we did that as the be tasks. And we did another one, where we created an intelligent onboarding flow, which meant that you couldn’t get in to the platform at all, unless you had done the bare minimum to set up like, for example, if you want to take an appointment, who’s you Who are you taking the appointment for? What service are they providing a couple things like that, you know, a couple simple things. And and then we let it run. And we found that 0% of the people that skipped it, and just went straight into the platform and poked around converted. And that didn’t require a whole lot of decision making afterward where the effects of the other onboarding yielded a much higher conversion rate. And then the our hypothesis was that it would create this but then we blew the hypothesis out of the water when our when we rolled that switch we called SmartStart. When we turned that on live our our support requests related to new client or new accounts that have dropped by 95% instantly. Wow. And because we didn’t have a scalable solution before, if all we had to do is add more users meant more people that we had to talk to on the phone and just like, it just wasn’t like, what happens if everything goes right people like you sell a lot of stuff, and you get a lot of new users and all of that, if you can’t support it, or scale it or all you need is more people or more butts and seats. It just eats up the profit. So yeah, that made it a that that that was probably my most profound experience when it came to like that storytelling. And the story with that isn’t story A, someone answers a few questions and comes into your platform ready to go story B they’re in there. And they’re just confused as hell. Yeah. Which led to a bunch of other changes we ended up making to make that part a lot more simple is, you know, part of what we also we kind of painted ourselves in a corner because through the creation of intelligent onboarding, we then gave you two different places to change settings, which we had to smooth that you got to understand the path before you effectively journey down and so Okay, So context is something with data and storytelling, that’s important. What, like, what’s the different kind of have, like, you guys work with a lot of different people. And you mentioned having an experience with fashion brands. I used to work in the music industry, that would be a completely different experience than someone signing up for QuickBooks. So how do you deal with like the different contexts that comes down on a client or user to user basis?

Courtney Lindau  19:03

Yeah, that’s a great question. So at Nimble gravity, we work with clients of all different types. So for example, I have a customer that is pet insurance. So like tracking a pet insurance funnel for getting insurance for my dog, and my cat is kind of a different experience than like a normal e commerce journey. We also have like apparel and typical kind of more standard ecommerce. We work with components companies, we work with the most interesting and different one is a funeral home tech company. So it’s kind of posting obituaries like it’s kind of like a WordPress type of thing to help the funeral homes host all their websites, post obituaries and then eventually, you can buy flowers or trees in honor of the deceased so that it’s kind of all on one platform instead of the family man Amber’s having to go somewhere else to find flowers. So super interesting. And in all of those different categories of business, and even more beyond that, every different website has different data that you’d want to track for it. So we always like to start with trying to figure out for that specific industry for that business, what are the specific KPIs that are maybe more unique than like the standard, of course, everyone wants to wants to make more money, revenue is always going to be important. But what are those like specific details that we can capture on the website that will help us get so much more rich data about the journey? So for example, if it’s like a SaaS product, and they’re really focused on lead generation, what can we track that’ll help us with lead scoring alongside Something maybe like a Salesforce? Or what is if it’s the funeral home tech company? How do we understand who these users are, and making sure that they’re getting this like very kind, nurturing experience in a time of their life that’s really challenging, like, what are those kinds of metrics and dimensions we can track about their journey and maybe different dimensions about like, the type of obituary it is that will help us provide a better experience for that type. Or if it’s just an apparel company, are there certain things about like a blue t shirt versus a red t shirt versus a polka dot t shirt, that makes it different, or might have a different type of customer that would shop for a different type of T shirt. So all of those things, no matter what type of website it is, there’s always going to be something really unique to that website, that is really unique to that business that we would want to track to help get deeper into their specific context and telling stories for that specific business.

Matt DeCoursey  21:55

I have a couple of comments on that, as a quick reminder, finding experts, software developers does not have to be difficult, especially when you go to FullScale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably. Use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs and see what available developers testers and leaders are ready to join your team go to full scale.io to learn more. You know, as the CEO and founder of Full Scale, I find myself giving advice to clients a lot about different approaches. And that was my comment that went with with like nimble gravity as I mean, I’ve talked to people all the time. And you know, I say, Well, consider trying this, this, we’ve seen a lot of success with that. And it’s a different like all clients, businesses, and everything is like snowflakes, you know, they’re all different. There’s different things that your businesses out of that mind as an app, and, you know, in some of that, and, and with that what I love about companies that reach out to other companies like nimble gravity, or Full Scale, or whatever is, is that, you know, they’re often doing it with an open mind and wanting to hear the things that because, you know, you get these facepalm moments and business where you’re like, I mean, I’ve literally said things to people and like almost like heard the palms slap the face. And they’re like, I can’t believe we didn’t think about that. Yeah. And that’s the, that’s the beauty of getting a different perspective in there. And I think that like data analytics companies and stuff like that, and what you want. So this is why, you know, a company like nimble gravity could be a good fit for you, because you’re talking about everything from like, funerals to fashion. And that, that there’s a lot of different things to be considered in there. Like and you know, some of that’s honestly a little odd, like, if you look at, okay, so who’s your user? What are they doing? And in some levels, what frame of mind are they in, if they just went through like a catastrophic loss? Like that’s a different journey from a different state of mind than someone that’s highly motivated to get through and set out? You know, so there’s, there’s a different story there. And, you know, listen to what these folks have to say, Now, you kind of you hit this, this the, you know, structuring the story and everything. Now, how important is like, visualizing this like, because I find that often the people that reach out to us and like, we get some people that are like, hyper organized, I’ve got this product roadmap, it looks really good. And then there’s some people that it’s almost like they’ve got a bar napkin, that it’s got, like in pencil, ya know, that it’s written down. And I think that organizationally, and font, you know, just in life functionally, when you can visualize things like we do all of that of Full Scale actually use Miro, I have no vested interest in you using marrow, but marrows, mind mapping, which makes it pretty easy to draw a graph and see like, hey, go here and go there. And you know, my company is we’re five years old, and we got 310 employees and we kind of had to do that out of necessity, because the amount of time that you have to go through to help people We’ll understand how to do things without that roadmap. It’s Oh, me, I’m, it’s just a mess.

Courtney Lindau  25:04

Yeah, I love Miro, also, for figma, or any of those visual tools, those are so helpful

Matt DeCoursey  25:12

for trying to make sense of same thing with the storytelling.

Courtney Lindau  25:15

I think especially with AV testing, so that’s really important or any work with a product team, I see a lot of value and like UI UX, being able to visualize it ahead of time. And it does work well alongside with analytics of if you’re getting tracking in place to say you’re running an A B test, and you want to change the look and feel of one of your steps or your form, having something like a Miro to really show what it’s going to look like, gives you perspective of okay, well, now, from a web analytics standpoint, I want to track clicks on all of these things. But maybe now I know that there’s some other dimension that I can capture from this form field that would help us give information about so say, it’s like a lead generation form, and they select their industry, well, maybe we’ll be capture that as a user dimension that will track for that user that we can use later for audience building or something. But having visuals is so helpful for people, especially when you’re working with teams across where you’re not in an office anymore. You know, teams all over the world, we have employees at Nimble gravity, throughout the US and South America and Mexico, kind of everywhere. So my team, particularly we don’t think there’s one of my employees is in Denver, the rest are all over the place. So having visuals, even just within nimble gravity is helpful. But then also with our clients being able to share things across between nimble gravity in clients and whatnot is really valuable for everyone getting on the same page and being able to think bigger for what the story might be for something new. But then on a reporting standpoint, of course, visualizations, really important there, too. So having dashboards that work for you to do a lot of the heavy lifting of putting all of your metrics in one place, so you’re not having to repol them every week, or every single time that you have a question about the same metric you’re going to ask about every day is super important. So that you can go to one place, see if something looks really good, or really bad, gives you all of the supporting metrics as well, that could help you figure out why it looks really good or really bad, quickly, so that you’re spending less time data polling and more time data storytelling.

Matt DeCoursey  27:38

And by the way, the struggle is real on that last part. I was quietly Scott Clayman smirking behind my microphone here. Because you know, the, cuz I don’t know, man. There’s just a zillion platforms that measure a zillion things. And you talked about a B testing, I’ve literally taken two different platforms that measure podcasts stuff that are both certified for measuring podcast stuff, and neither agree with each other. Oh, yeah. So that’s always fun. That’s the whole thing. And then you’re pulling it in and like and then here’s the thing is the difference between a startup and a franchise is the startup doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, right, which means you got to figure all this shit out on your own. And that can be a lot to deal with it. A lot to deal with. And that kind of brings me to the next point. What what are some tips or ways so you can blow everybody’s mind? With way too much info way too much data way too much scope way too many tickets way too much all of that. What do you guys do to simplify it? So it can be a little more understood? You know, there’s just saying that if you’re going to eat an elephant, and by the way, I don’t condone eating elephants, but if you’re going to do it, if you were to do it, you’re still going to have to do it one bite at a time. And which means that you know, and then, I mean, really, like if you go back and just the history of science, like Occum’s Razor states that the simplest solution is often right. And so that simplicity, like what do you guys go through to say, hey, all right, or I should say, what do you do to dumb it down for some people?

Courtney Lindau  29:21

Yeah, that’s a great question. I always

Matt DeCoursey  29:25

feel like you get weeded. Sometimes you got to dumb it down for people. Right?

Courtney Lindau  29:29

Well, I think it’s always good to look at it from the most simple view because like you said, it’s so easy for it to explode into too many, too many things, too much data, too many platforms that say different things. Really, my recommendation is starting with what is your main goal of your website or your business? So if your main goal is revenue for an E commerce business, essentially the whole website’s purpose is to drive you through to checkout and to drive you through to make a transaction. So that’s the best place to start. And starting with, okay, how do they get from the homepage to purchase? And what are the different ways that they can get on your website? Where would they land, and how to get from that landing page to purchase? Looking at those different funnel paths is a really good starting place for just getting like the high level. And that should be kind of your main metrics you’re looking at on your weekly, daily monthly basis of okay, how are we doing with driving people to do this main goal. And then of course, you can have supporting metrics that help you figure out each piece of that funnel journey, you know, if someone wants to dig deeper into it. So maybe from a dashboarding perspective, your first page or your dashboard, or your first visualization is the whole funnel, and looking at your high level metrics to get to purchase. And then if you find that there’s a drop off point, then maybe you have a secondary page that the people who care about that page can go look at, but not get overwhelmed with having all of the data in one place. Because, you know, if you’re an executive, maybe you just want to see the high level. And then someone who is like a Pio working on the product team that’s working on the search page, and the search page has a problem, they want to know everything about that search page. So making it contextualized for the person within the business as well, within your dashboards is really helpful, which can also be kind of all still within the same primary dashboard. Whether it’s Power BI Tableau, Looker Studio, you can really build your dashboards in a way where it’s like high level overview, and then drill downs for each page of the funnel, or each kind of context of the business that would need to see it.

Matt DeCoursey  31:58

I got a newsflash for you future scientists out there. Once you change something, you got to go do you got you’ve now changed the science of it, you talked about the five steps to buy dinner, getting to buy something, and you’ve identified that you’re not getting to steps three, four, and five, because of a bunch of stuff that occurs in step two, and you go fix that, you got to re science, the rest of it people because that’s going to change that could, you could Okay, and I in a world full of problems that aren’t the worst to have. Now, you might have too many buyers at step three, or something like that you’re gonna You can’t you can’t take the assumptions from one. You know, sad if you can’t science in one way and then say, oh, but it’s going to be the same. So it’s an ongoing process. And I don’t think this is when you talk about this isn’t something that ever really has a right or wrong answer is it’s a kind of always like in motion. Is there a right answer? I mean, something simple, like, does this button work? Should we fix it? Yes. Okay, that’s not what I’m talking about. I meant like a bigger scope and the story like, story. I mean, while if you go, I guess if you’re gonna go read Harry Potter, that’s a story that’s written and it’s got, it’s not going to change. But I think it’s business scientists, our story is constantly evolving and changing, isn’t that?

Courtney Lindau  33:23

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s constantly changing. And every business is different. So even if you read an article online, or you hear someone say, this worked really well, for my business, this is how you should set up your website, or this is exactly how the best checkout is, or a lot of times people look at Amazon and say, well, Amazon checkout is like this, should our checkout be like this? But essentially…

Matt DeCoursey  33:48

You have the resources that Amazon has, the people, the money, the time that… Yeah.

Courtney Lindau  33:54

Yeah. But we’ve also had cases where we are able to give a similar look and feel, you know, with within the capabilities of the team, but kind of give that experience of at Amazon checkout, where it’s kind of all on one page, it’s easy to do one step by and sometimes it doesn’t work for the audience. So even if it works really well for Amazon, and people see Amazon as like this huge e commerce force. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work for every business. And that’s where, again, the science is so important to keep iterating and keep measuring. Because you may find that for a certain subset of users, if it’s a product for users that are older, they’ll have a different experience and a product for users that are younger, and how everyone experiences is so different for every different product. So that’s where it’s so important to keep testing and keep measuring and then checking over time as you make two changes, just like you said, because you might fix step two, but that now you have to reconsider. Is there anything We can fix it step three, because maybe now the issues at step three, you have to keep checking and finding where we can keep improving.

Matt DeCoursey  35:07

Well, the ones that you know, I liked, I’m kind of known amongst my friends and peers for not making promises, there’s only one promise that I will make. And that’s that things will change. And you know, the only constant that you can count on is change, whether that’s an a way that you like it, or that you don’t like it. If you’re if you hear the word, these following words being spoken at your company, you need to go back and figure out a way to not say this, but this is always the way we’ve done it. Because that is what data is what companies and people and organizations that lack innovation, that lack growth, that that you are you are Omni perspective, and Omni perspective viewer. They’re like you see one view, and you need to see a lot of them. And there’s a lot of different cases, like you mentioned, like, it depends on what you’re selling, like. So you mentioned the older people. So I have this, I have a rule that I call Well, first off, my number one rule of building software is answering this question. Is this annoying? And if the answer is not a hard, no, then you have work to do. Because you can have a great product offering you can have a great software platform, but if something about it is annoying, people will hate it. And you know, and some of that site user experience, like you talked about the number of steps like why do I have to go through three different pages, start this over again, and do the same thing I got to do again and again. And again. And again, and you put yourself have a little bit of empathy with your users. You know, and and, you know, that’s, that’s a big, a big thing. And then the other I got another role that I call five and 75. And that was created when my daughter was five, and my dad was 75. And I was like can either have that could either of them potentially figure this out? Because it is simple. People want simple stuff folks, like that’s the thing.

Matt DeCoursey  37:07

And you know, I mean, I’ve read it’s called Hooked by Nir Eyal, as I look up at my shelf of largely unread books, that’s one I did actually read but that whole books about like, what are the what are the hooks that that product builders and software purveyors or whatever, like what do they create? Now, in that book, they  talk about Twitter has got like this remarkably simple, fast, let’s go now onboarding, you know, it’s like, boom, boom, boom. And you’re and I want to challenge those of you that are building software, or building a product or building anything to go in and like how many steps you have, how much stuff is in there? How quickly can I get in and get moving? And you can always always improve that, you can see that that’s– We go back to Amazon. Why is Amazon a monster and what they have they’ve been moving towards, because I can buy it simply, I can buy it with trust. And I can buy it with the feeling that it’s going to be there quickly. And that’s what they’ve spent billions probably getting to and arriving at is being able to have that level of efficiency. So and look, there are little to no steps on the way to that cash register. It’s like there, it’d be like the cash register followed you around the store. And all you have to do is reach over and go. And then it’s gonna buy it.

Matt DeCoursey  38:40

Now what I mean that’s, there’s a lot to be said there. There’s no that’s and by the way, it’s also a simpler process, to maintain, to review results for, to do all of that.

Matt DeCoursey  38:52

All right. So here we are, man that went so fast. We sold such a great story, we almost ran out of time. So much to the point that I need to remind everyone if you want to hire software engineers, testers and leaders Full Scale can help we have the people the platform and the process. To help you build and manage a team of experts. All you need to do is go to FullScale.io You answer a few questions fast. Our onboarding takes less than two minutes. It’s true. I insisted upon that. I carved steps out of that. Maybe out of steps to carve out but after answering a few questions that our platform matches you up with fully vetted highly experienced software engineers testers laters because that’s what you want it all along anyway. So Full Scale, we specialize in building long term teams that work only for you learn more FullScale.io.

Matt DeCoursey  39:42

Once again with me today was Courtney Lindau and representing Nimble Gravity, nimblegravity.com. I feel like they probably have some solutions for you. corneas we had out of another episode of Startup Hustle. What would you like to say everyone to anyone and everyone on the way out?

Courtney Lindau  40:04

Yeah, so if you’re looking for any help with data, so data science, web analytics, ecommerce data strategy, Nimble Gravity is a great consultancy that can help you out with answering all of your difficult questions and helping you story tell with data.

Matt DeCoursey  40:22

And that’s good. If you haven’t done it, like I said, get people. So I’m a big storytelling Bob kind of guy. In fact, one of my favorite marketing books is The Story Brand, which kind of tells you how to tell a marketing story and get people in there. If you’re listening, and you’re a founder and entrepreneur, you know, the best and most successful founders are great storytellers, so much of culture in life and history. And all of it revolves around storytelling, and there’s a story to be told, with all success and all failure. So if you’re not paying attention to what that story is in your business, you are likely missing out on being able to tell a better story about your own success. So go do it. Or I’ll check up on you down the road.

Courtney Lindau  41:08

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.